NETWAR
Somewhere in Northern California, a platoon of marines falls under attack. Not far away, aboard the command ship USS Coronado, officers pinpoint the enemy's coordinates using satellite imagery and an unmanned aerial vehicle. Almost instantly, a 120-mm automated mortar returns fire.
Less than a mile up the road, Bravo Company is preparing to storm a naval hospital occupied by a rogue militia. A bespectacled corporal looks up from a chest-mounted Toshiba Libretto 100CT equipped with GPS and wireless modem and reports we're all dead. "Friendly fire," he says.
Luckily, reality is the first casualty of simulated warfare. All the drama is part of a military experiment called Urban Warrior (Fleet Battle Experiment Echo at sea), a beta test of how today's off-the-shelf technology will hold up on tomorrow's battlefield. Scenarios in this March military exercise, staged by 6,000 personnel from the Navy's 3rd Fleet and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force plus 200 civilian role-players, include a mock earthquake, a biochemical attack, and a civil uprising; one envisions a war against stateless criminals armed with weapons of mass destruction, another has the marines providing humanitarian assistance to refugees.
The troops are outfitted with souped-up Librettos, ultraportable radios from Ericsson, Motorola, and Kenwood, and the Miles 2000, a smarter version of a laser-tag vest. But when the plan hits the pavement, netwar seems more haywired than hardwired. The radios go down (victims of jamming or too much ferroconcrete in the urban areas), the Librettos don't react well to the stress of combat, and the forces run out of bandwidth faster than bullets.
Despite the glitches, cyberwar is coming, according to Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. An architect of the experiment, he maintains that nations make war much as they make wealth - and that net-tech is key to both. Information and engagement grids produce graphic-rich environments that increase awareness and augment combat power. Translation: One big warnet will render the enemy transparent. With speed as the killer variable, what Cebrowski terms "networkcentric warfare" is now the model for the next millennium.
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